Old Map of London in 1746 by John Rocque, Sheet F1 - Shoreditch, Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Whitechapel, Hackney

Few sheets in Rocque's twenty-four-part survey capture a single trade as clearly as sheet F1, drawn across the Huguenot weaving district that grew up around Spitalfields in the decades before 1746. Sitting in the top row of the survey's grid, east of the City and north of the Thames, this sheet covers the ground between Shoreditch and Whitechapel Road, an area that filled rapidly with weavers' houses, market stalls and dissenting chapels through the early eighteenth century.

Spitalfields Market, established under royal charter in 1638, appears at the centre of the sheet, surrounded by the terraced houses built for the French Protestant refugees who settled here after fleeing persecution in the 1680s. Brick Lane runs north from Whitechapel, already lined with breweries drawing on the area's supply of local water, while Shoreditch to the north-west retains traces of its earlier reputation as home to London's first purpose-built playhouses in the sixteenth century. Hackney appears at the sheet's northern edge, still a loose scatter of villages and market gardens rather than a built-up suburb, and Tower Hamlets forms the wider administrative hundred stretching south toward the docks.

Anyone with roots in Spitalfields, Whitechapel or Hackney, or an interest in the silk trade that shaped this corner of Georgian London, will find the sheet a rewarding gift to mark a birthday, a house move, or simply a shared love of East End history. It is reproduced at high resolution from the 1746 engraving and available unframed in the same range of sizes as the rest of our Rocque series.